Thomas McGuane - Panama

It was quiet for a long time.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s all I want!” he said, and his voice caught. He turned away. He hurled the racquetball bag into the well and walked off to a waiting car.

So, you see?

I DECIDED that if I was to break out of my present pattern of impoverishment, sorrows, and anger, and stop waiting for everything with Catherine to repair itself, then I would have to fly in the face of my instincts and perhaps discipline myself and do things I didn’t want to do and make friends with Peavey even though he was robbing my stepmother of what was rightfully hers and ensconcing himself in her Florida room with his associates and his bimbo secretary. This was not going to be easy. This was going to be a bitch. But if I succeeded, I might begin to make sense to other people too.

I got there rather early in the morning. Mary, the housekeeper, was sitting on the front stoop, drunk. I said good morning and she attempted a reply but could only make a bubble, though it was a good-sized one. I stepped past her and went into the house. I saw Peavey immediately. He looked up at me without acknowledgment, crossed to the Florida room, and closed the door behind him. He was dressed rather simply: a grimy pair of Fruit of the Loom underdrawers. When he opened the door, I caught a glimpse of his secretary rolled up in a sleeping bag and idly returning the empties to a six-pack carton.

Roxy was in the living room, legs crossed at her writing desk, looking smart in an off-pink Chanel suit. This set piece of normalcy was not going to take me in.

“Sit down, Chet, I’ll be with you in a moment.”

“Take your time.”

“Bills, obligations, God.”

“What’s Counselor Peavey doing running around in his underwear?”

“Just got up. What’s seven times nine?”

“Sixty-three. Was that his secretary in the sleeping bag?”

“Sometimes she’s a secretary. She’s kind of a late riser. Works late. If that little gal gets wind of the Equal Rights Amendment, Peavey’ll have his hands full. — I thought so! The aqueduct commission has robbed me to the tune of two dollars and nineteen cents. Did you see Ruiz when you came in?”

“No.”

“Well, he’s selling my grapefruits. I’m going to skin that chiseler.”

We could hear Peavey making not-quite-human noises through the door to the Florida room.

“What’s he charging?” Roxy asked.

“Who?”

“Ruiz. For the grapefruits.”

“God, Roxy, I’ve never seen him selling your grapefruits.”

Mary walked through the room with a thin row of bubbles on her lips.

“What’s the matter with her?” I asked.

“Get that fly,” shouted Roxy.

“Roxy, what fly?”

“What fly? The fly walking through my addition practically into your face.”

“I want to give you away.”

“I think your father should do that.”

“But I’m having a party at the Casa Marina,” I said.

“Who’s the orchestra?”

“Jorge Cruz.”

“That’s very nice. Jorge is very good indeed. Plays some attractive sambas—” Roxy got to her feet and began to samba. I could see her starting to get peculiar and I returned her to her chair.

“Don’t start shoving me around,” she snarled. “Not with my obligations you don’t.”

“I just wanted you to sit and talk to me for a moment.”

“I’ve got a thieving gardener, a stack of bills like that, and a drunken attorney with an outside line consorting in my Florida room with some women’s libber in a sleeping bag.”

“Well, why are you marrying him!”

Peavey peeked out of the door.

“Who asked for your two cents?” he demanded.

“I just I…”

“Nixon.”

He withdrew.

* * *

The usual pattern of mayhem in the morning paper was altered in the edition of The Key West Citizen I bought to forget the situation at Roxy’s (where I had got no reply to my offer to give away my stepmother, in matrimony). A young couple living on Big Coppitt, having fun with morphine and Quaaludes, beat up their three-year-old son and threw him through the window; the little boy took seventeen hours to die. Page 2: “Hints for Shell Collectors.”

I walked to my place with tinned dog food, stepped into the patio, and said, “Deirdre” to my dog. I had named her, after seven years. I held out my arms and she leapt about, running on her hind legs. “Deirdre,” I said, “Deirdre, Deirdre, Deirdre.” And for a moment, page one’s hint that the human race was in line for a fiery death, vanished.

I looked out at the ocean, past the ruined pier where nothing was visible except Don smoking in the shadows. I called out, “Aren’t you hot in that suit?” and opened a can of dog food. Weird guy, Don; he smokes Virginia Slims and carries his car and office keys hanging on a split ring from the belt loop of his gleaming suit. I have to study him as a means of keeping him at arm’s length. A less patient man than me would pull all his teeth or something. When I looked out again, Don was gone, but his cigarette smoke was still in the air, quite visible against the quiet blue sea.

Beyond the wall, I could hear sunbathers talking and I eavesdropped on their senseless conversations. Deirdre stood beside me.

“Scarred for life…”

“Not excited…”

“… nothing personal between us.”

“Girl is getting me down. (I spoke to her of) … Rasputin, the Kalahari, the telegraphy of souls and ocean. All she wants to do is sixty-nine.”

* * *

Then I went straight back to Roxy’s, blood in my eye. I went to the outside window on the west side of the house, stood among the raped grapefruit trees, adjusting the garden hose. Peavey was dictating a memo to the bimbo and I let that shitsucker have it, squirting everything and shorting out the typewriter. Peavey said I wouldn’t be able to say I didn’t ask for it. His hair spread in vertical lines behind his glasses. There were puddles.

* * *

The morning mail made a terrific difference. Paramount had released Chronicles of a Depraved Pervert, which was good for a deferment of just about a half a million dollars. I wrote out a deposit, knowing I’d cover the check before it went through. Oh, boy. I went back to the same teller, endorsed and presented the check. “Call me when this clears.”

“I shall.”

“Break your balls?”

“It’s only money.”

When I got to the house again, the phone was ringing. I answered it and had a long, tormenting conversation with someone close to me, which confused me very much as it was someone I had long believed to be dead. My own unstoried dead are an important phase of my current balance and having them pop up like this produces unusual stress and an urge for mayhem. The living are skeletons in livery anyway. I’m not going for this. My first impulse was to wonder if they ever found Jesse James’s body.

* * *

I bought a Land-Rover, and an attractive home for Catherine. She refused to look at the house on her own. I didn’t feel I had the time; I had bought the place by phone and didn’t want to be disappointed. She was tending to Marcelline again; Marcelline’s fiancé—I didn’t know she’d had one — was arrested in New Orleans for grave robbery. I thought this was a ghastly crime but Marcelline assured Catherine that many young musicians in that city survive by robbing the Creole cemeteries.

“I thought she hated the Cornstalks Hotel because it was full of musicians.”

“One was right for her.”

“One was right for her? What does he play?”

“What?”

“What instrument?”